[83908] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Specifying distance traveled (was Art of War Chp. 2 (section 1/3))
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alan Anderson)
Wed Jan 9 21:35:27 2008
In-Reply-To: <47855DCA.7080609@trimboli.name>
From: Alan Anderson <aranders@insightbb.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2008 21:32:35 -0500
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Jan 9, 2008, at 6:50 PM, David Trimboli wrote:
> Here's what I think is a pretty simple example of a topic in use:
>
> Qel'e' SID vor ghaH
> As for the doctor, he cured the patient.
It's simple, yes, but is it correct? The topic suffix doesn't move
the subject of the sentence to the front. I can't see expressing the
idea as anything but {SID vor Qel'e'}. (Maybe you can supply
supporting context that would make this example seem less broken, but
it would probably cease to be simple at that point.)
The whole idea of "header topics" makes me uneasy anyway. {-'e'} is
a syntactic marker, identifying the role of the noun in a sentence.
Most of the discussion of putting it on a "header" noun uses examples
where that noun doesn't really *have* a clear role in the sentence --
and saying "the role is the _topic_" doesn't help me. Most of the
time I see it used here, it's more the "topic of conversation" rather
than anything to do with the action of the sentence. The one
relevant canon example I can think of is a comparative construction,
which doesn't follow the regular rules of word order in the first
place, making it incompletely suitable as a pattern for general usage.
